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Why do this? Isn’t the Town just going to ignore it?
“Ignore it” is exactly what one-off complaints allow, and exactly what a durable record defeats. A single email to a clerk is archived in a click. A documented, owner-attributed, ADS-B-verified pattern that residents can cite consistently is a different thing: it has to be answered.
Here is the part that turns silence against them. Colorado law (HB24-1235) does not merely ask the Town to publish a noise program; it requires the Town to establish and enforce an effective one, and ties its state grant funding to it. So when complaints pile up and nothing happens, that inaction is not the end of the story. It is the evidence. A Colorado Open Records Act request turns “they ignored us” into a documented gap between what the Town certified to the state and what it actually did.
You are not shouting into a void. You are building a record the Town, its Council, CDOT, and the press will each have to reckon with. Ignoring it does not make it go away; it makes the case.
The obligation the Town leaves out
“Voluntary” is not the same as optional. Colorado law requires Erie to run a program that works.
Federal law does limit mandatory curfews and bans; those need the demanding FAA Part 161 process, which airports rarely clear. That is the grain of truth in “it’s all voluntary.” It is also where the Town’s account stops, and where the law does not.
Isn’t the whole thing voluntary, so nothing can be required?
Not of the Town. Colorado’s HB24-1235 directs that state aviation-fund money be withheld from a covered airport unless it demonstrates, to the satisfaction of the Division of Aeronautics, that it has “voluntarily established and enforces an effective noise mitigation plan.” The Division has named the airports it covers, and Erie Municipal is one of the five (with Centennial, Rocky Mountain Metropolitan, Boulder, and Longmont/Vance Brand).
So the choice is not “mandatory curfew or nothing.” The Town has a state-law duty to run a noise program that actually works, and its eligibility for discretionary state grant funding is conditioned on it. “We can’t force pilots” does not answer for whether the Town is meeting its own obligation.
What makes a plan “effective” instead of just published?
Education is not compliance. Reminding pilots in general is a broadcast; compliance is following up with the specific operator about each specific complaint. A documented pre-8 a.m. circuit that produces no contact with the operator that flew it is a program being announced, not executed.
A real program has a defined response when education fails. Erie’s own materials say the Town can work directly with flight schools, collect complaint data, track repeat operators, request changes in operating practices, and coordinate with neighboring airports. A credible escalation ladder built from those tools:
(1) document the first apparent noncompliance and notify the identified operator; (2) after repeats, contact the flight school; (3) notify the operator’s home airport and the regional working group; (4) track repeat operators and publish anonymized monthly compliance metrics; (5) ask for a corrective commitment; (6) measure whether pre-8 a.m. touch-and-go activity actually drops; (7) if voluntary measures keep failing, formally evaluate stronger options, including a Part 161 study.
A program with no metrics, no reporting cadence, and no escalation is not a noise-abatement program. It is a communications program. No metrics, no enforcement.
So what are you actually asking the airport manager?
Not to invent authority he does not have. To use the authority, data, relationships, and state-grant obligations he already has:
“I understand federal law limits the Town’s ability to impose an immediate mandatory curfew. What I do not accept is that those limits relieve the Town of responsibility for actively pursuing compliance with its published quiet hours. Colorado law requires Erie to establish and enforce an effective program, and Erie itself lists operator outreach, repeat-operator tracking, complaint collection, and regional coordination as available tools. I want to understand how those tools are being used, what escalation follows repeated noncompliance, and how the Town will determine whether its program is actually working.”
The three answers we hear most
Each is true as far as it goes. None of them is a reason to do nothing.
“The noise-abatement procedures are voluntary, so nothing can be done.”
Voluntary does not mean powerless. Federal rules constrain mandatory access restrictions: a curfew or a ban would need a formal FAA process, and we are not asking for either. They do not constrain the non-restrictive steps that are squarely the Town’s to take: publicizing the procedures the airport already prints, engaging the operators directly, and keeping a public record of how each complaint is resolved.
“We can’t force compliance” answers a question no one asked. The question is whether the Town will use the tools it does have. As the airport’s sponsor, the Town is the party the FAA holds responsible for running its noise program in the first place.
“A lot of these are transient aircraft we can’t identify.”
Two things. First, the airport’s own procedures ask all aircraft (including visiting ones) to follow them; not knowing a tail number doesn’t exempt the pattern. Second, we do identify them: every qualifying session carries the tail number from public ADS-B and the aircraft’s FAA-registered owner when available.
And a large share of the early-morning circuits are not transient at all: they are flown by aircraft based at Erie, including the field’s own flight-school tenant, whom the Town can reach directly through its lease and operating agreements. Aircraft shuffling between Erie, Longmont, Boulder, and Rocky Mountain Metro to stay ahead of each field’s quiet hours isn’t evidence the problem is unsolvable; it’s evidence the voluntary approach is being worked around.
“Early-morning training is a safety matter: cooler, calmer air.”
Cool morning air is genuinely nicer to fly in. But nicer is not necessary. The alternative to 6:00 a.m. is not dangerous afternoon heat; it’s a start after 8:00 a.m., which is all the airport’s own procedures ask for.
Mid-morning conditions at Erie sit well within the performance margins of the light trainers doing this pattern work. “We prefer the calm air” is a real preference. It is not a safety reason the neighborhood’s quiet hours have to be traded away.
The basics
A few things worth clearing up.
What are the “procedures” you keep citing?
The Town of Erie publishes General Aviation Voluntary Noise Abatement Procedures for Erie Municipal Airport. Among them: avoid touch-and-go landings before 8 a.m. (or after 5 p.m.), a cap of ten touch-and-goes, and avoid pattern work after 8 p.m. The detector scores documented sessions against those published rules. We didn’t write them; the airport did.
What are you actually asking the Town to do?
Four things, none of them a restriction on FAA-regulated flight: (1) log every report on the airport’s complaint record; (2) have the airport manager engage the operators, starting with the ones based at the field; (3) weigh whether the voluntary procedures, as written, actually protect residents’ early hours, or should be strengthened; and (4) tell us what follow-up was taken.
Is this a campaign against the airport or its pilots?
No. Erie’s airport is a community asset, and most pilots fly considerately. This is about one specific, repeated pattern (low training circuits over homes in the quiet early hours), documented as one measured session per event using public data. We don’t allege anyone broke the law. We document what flew and when, and ask the Town to respond.
The question the answers never reach
So what happens after all of this documentation?
That is the one question the response never reaches. Voluntary or not, transient or not, calm air or not, the flights keep coming, and the record keeps growing. What we are asking is simple: that the Town say, on the record, what it will do when documented, repeated early-morning noise over its own neighborhoods continues.